Bryn Mawr
Classical Review 97.5.18

"I went to Rome with a young friend, educated on the latest
lines, and who had taken historical honours at Cambridge. The first
morning the pats of butter came up stamped with the Twins. 'Good old
Romulus and Remus', said I. 'Good old who?' said she. She had never heard
of the Twins and was much bored when I told her the story; they had no
place in 'constitutional history', and for her the old wolf of the Capitol
howled in vain: 'Great God! I'd rather be...'" -- Jane Harrison,
Reminiscences of a Student's Life (London 1925),
24.

How wrong she was!

In this exciting and persuasive monograph,
Peter
Wiseman argues that the singular figure of Remus in the foundation saga of
Rome derives from representations in festival drama associated with the
intense ideological debates of the enormously important generations which
immediately followed the Licinio-Sextian revolution: Remus as we know him
is what is left of the founding father of the plebeian cause. Through him,
therefore, we can perceive just a little more of the otherwise shadowy
epoch of Ap. Claudius the Blind. His central thesis is so original and so
arresting that I have been tempted to examine it in some detail in this
review: if I remain uncertain about the pinpoint accuracy with which he
feels able to home in on the genesis of the Remus story, that scarcely at
all detracts from the pleasure and interest of the experience of exploring
the formation of history in Rome before Roman history began with Wiseman
as cicerone.

About three corollary arguments there can be no
dissent. The Rome of this age was a place in which any argument from
familiar practice in the late Republic is inapplicable, or at least
unreliable, and we must not be startled by strangeness. And the foundation
myth is indeed very strange: above all in its uncompromising accumulation
of negative images about the foundation and the early history of the city.
It is clearly very likely that it bears the imprint of the late fourth and
early third century, which certainly was one of the pivotal ages in any
version of Roman history -- as Wiseman memorably suggests (31-5), from the
viewpoint we expect a true historian of this city to adopt, the equivalent
of the Augustan or Constantinian periods, or the creation of Roma
Capitale in the years that followed 1871. That this is
uncontroversial -- even if it is not yet as widely known as it should
be -- is
to a large extent the consequence of Filippo Coarelli's brilliant
reasoning (Il Foro Romano II: periodo repubblicano ed Augusteo,
Rome 1985) about the Comitium and Forum Romanum of the middle Republic (if
we should continue to use that label). Central to Coarelli's
reconstruction (87-91) were the monuments of the Comitium, including the
dedication (296 B.C.) by the Ogulnius brothers of the Wolf and Twins (Livy
10, 23, 11-12), which, it transpires, is the first completely unambiguous
attestation of the developed saga which we all know so well -- too well,
as
Wiseman plausibly proposes.

Coarelli dismissed the old
explanations of the Twins as evocations of the consular imperium or the
Sabine-Roman split: 'si tratta sempre di spiegazioni troppo generiche, e
comunque lontane da preoccupazioni piu attuali che, sia pur attraverso il
velo della metafora, personalità come quelle degli Ogulnii,
così
direttamente impegnati nella lotta politica del loro tempo, avranno pur
nutrito'. 'Each text is first of all a historical document for its own
time', as Momigliano put it (Contributo III [1966], 677-87,
originally JRS 35 [1945], 99-104, at 103). And Wiseman embarks on the
stratigraphy of the foundation-legend. But the historical contexts for
which he searches are quite specialised, compared with Momigliano's
prescription: 'I assume for the sake of argument that each of the stories
that has come down to us was created with some sort of contemporary
situation in mind' (45). For Wiseman, Remus the slow (an aspect of the
remus-tale which is brilliantly explored here) is a new joint founder for
the newly double city of the Licinio-Sextian reforms; his death was
originally a heroic sacrifice, perverted by patrician counter-propaganda
into a punishment for hubris instead of a Mus-style devotio
fitting
in
the
generation of the Battle of Sentinum.

Investigating the horizons,
preoccupations and ideologies with which each age processes and adds to
its literary and historical inheritance is certainly more congenial than
taking mythological material as random, and more productive than studying
its structural resemblances to parallel tales from completely extraneous
cultures. But I find Wiseman's claim too strong. Stories processed at a
place and time have varying degrees and qualities of connexion with that
time, and we gauge them through a fog in which the tralatician and the
mimetic prowl and prowl around. To make his argument plain, Wiseman has
intensified the chiaroscuro by turning up the contrast, and made crisp
outlines and disjunctions appear through the haze.

I remain
somewhat uneasy, therefore, about the brisk clarity of the three questions
on which (89) he insists: 'Why a twin?' Why call him Remus?' 'Once you
have got him, why kill him off?' All three imply a very high degree of
correspondence between the mood of the age and the content of the tale.
They also fragment the concept at the heart of the tale unnecessarily. In
mythopoeia, for instance, there is no need to postulate -- even
metaphorically -- chronological layering. The twin-slaying founder can
quite
easily be a free-standing concept, drawing on and instantiating two rich
traditions -- the mythical resonances of the intimacies and peculiarities
of
twinship, and the persistent paradox of the foundation of the new city
despite or through strife, sacrifice or violence. I am also more impressed
than he is by the geminal backdrop: the Dioscuri, the Penates, the Lares,
Herakles and Iphikles (pretty assymetrical, even if it didn't come to
violence), Idas and Lynceus. These narratives and associations can exert
influence in a less literal way than Wiseman demands. Hippias and
Hipparchus didn't have to be twins to be represented as the Dioscuri in
Pisistratid Athens and Delos (see recently Ph. Jockey, 'Les Dioscures,
Pisistrate et les Pisistratides: à propos de deux cavaliers
montés
archaiques du Musée de Délos', REA 95 [1993], 45-59).
Other
siblings
don't obstruct the story either. At Sparta, moreover, on which many of
these themes focus, it is hard to deny an association between the wider
phenomenon of the mythical twin and the dual monarchy, even though in
detail Castor and Pollux are not in direct correspondence with the
strictly exegetical myth-pair Eurysthenes and Procles. In the light, we
may add, of the arguments in Carol Dougherty's recent work on the
Ktisissagen (e.g. 'It's murder to found a colony', in Cultural poetics
in ancient Greece, edd. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, Cambridge 1993,
178-200, cf. The Poetics of Colonization (New York 1993), even
fratricide may no longer look so outre in the already striking list of
uncomplimentary associations which the Romans accumulated about the
various stages of their foundation. So I am tempted to answer two of
Wiseman's questions by saying that the twin-slaying suits admirably the
super-tough apoikia-to-end-all-apoikiai whose battle-hardened heroes were
more Laconian than the Spartans and needed no cosy apologetics in their
Ktisissaga. But can we date that unattractive locality?

Wiseman's
technique is essentially similar to that of Jacques Perret, who argued 50
years ago that the Aeneas story was invented by Pyrrhus the New Achilles
(cf. Pausanias 1, 11, 7) to package his Italian enemies. Such an argument
means that apparent earlier allusions must be disposed of systematically.
Perret's task was hard (see Momigliano, supra, for a review) and
ultimately fruitless: Wiseman seems to be on to something better,
precisely because, while there are early accounts that refute Perret
because they mention Aeneas, they don't mention any male eponym for Rome
(on the theme, see now G. Vanotti, L'altro Enea [Rome 1995]). The
silence is eloquent for Wiseman. Leaving the epic tradition, Stesichorus'
Geryoneis and Hecataeus' interests in Trojan foundations in Italy
aside,
there is the evidence of Hellanicus and his pupil Damastes, both of whom
certainly addressed the question of the foundation, and certainly did not
mention Romulus and Remus: one Rhome, in the age of Aeneas, is their
eponym. Agathocles of Samos, the local historian of Cyzicus, who was
murdered by the Alexandrian mob at the end of the third century, still
preferred the Rhome version, though he knew several authors who spoke of a
male eponym, Rhomos. For us, Rhomos first surfaces in writings of the age
of Aristotle, Alcimus (whose teacher Stilpon of Megara died in 309), and
Callias of Syracuse, the Agathocles-historian, fourth century authors who
all wrote on the Aeneas episode: the last two are the only approximately
datable exemplars of a widespread tradition adding to that account the
activities of one or both of two eponyms called Rhomos and Rhomylos. It is
notable that among the authorities adjoining these figures to Aeneas were
some of the Roman writers after Fabius Pictor. We should add that the
mysterious Xenagoras who named a trio of brothers as eponyms for Rome,
Ardea and Antium is, as Wiseman argues, quite likely to be early because
of the history of the latter two communities. Another of Wiseman's (more
tentative: 57-60) 'dogs that didn't bark' 'Promathion' does not seem to me
likely to be early. I share the opinion recently expressed by G.
Capdeville (Volcanus. Récherches comparatistes sur les
origines du
culte de Vulcain [Rome 1995], 62-3, n. 4) about this author: although
his 'récit très composite' may include early material from
whatever
source, it is impossible to imagine a fifth century Pythagorean compiling
an Italike historia (note that that is indeed the title at Plutarch
Romulus 2: Wiseman's "Italika" [57] is misleading). But this is in
my
view
a help for Wiseman, since 'Promathion' appears to have mentioned twins
explicitly, alone of the earlier accounts.

The early authors,
therefore, support the explicit testimony of Plutarch that no account of
the Romulus and Remus story existed in Greek before Diocles of Peparethus,
the source of Fabius Pictor in the late third century and in all
probability his near contemporary (P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic
Alexandria 769 and 1076 n.373, very likely correct: Wiseman 61 is too
cautious). Now for Wiseman the silence about the precise story of Romulus
and Remus as we know it is most significant. He uses it to support his
view that when the Ogulnii dedicated their monument in the Comitium, the
story was relatively new. A mirror-back scene of the late fourth century,
from Bolsena, which he interprets very acutely and interestingly also
pretty clearly shows the scene.

I am not wholly persuaded by the
argument. There are two more silent hounds, whose negative witness is
oddly played down here: Hieronymus of Cardia and Timaeus of Tauromenion,
both writing in the immediate aftermath of the Pyrrhic War. Hieronymus was
the first person to write a 'Roman archaeology' (cf. J. Hornblower,
Hieronymus of Cardia [Oxford 1981], 139); Timaeus (who argued
against Callias the historian of Agathocles) composed a quite detailed
account of Rome in which he made fun of the alleged link between the
October horse-sacrifice to Mars and the Trojan Horse, and gave a date for
the foundation of the city. It is very striking indeed that -- unless the
later authors are wrong -- neither of these accounts can have had much
-- or
more probably anything -- to say about Romulus and/or Remus. So Greeks
could
have a great deal to say about Rome in the generation when the monument of
the Ogulnii was new, and omit the tale which it reflected entirely.

It is essential to make allowance for the intentions of these authors,
their genre and their rhetorical aims. If the early Greek writers were
interested mainly in nostos stories in the West, they would not count as
narrators of the foundation of Rome, any more than did Epicharmus or
Antiochus of Syracuse because of their casual allusions to the city. If
the fourth-century writers are interested in the comparative customs of
barbarians, as seems to be true in the peripatetic tradition, that does
not count as Roman history or antiquities. If the third century authors
are interested, as they still seem to be, in Opponents of the Hellene
(even misguided Hellenes like Pyrrhus), then they may give data like
Timaeus' synchronism of the foundations of Carthage and Rome, but still
not qualify as 'expounding the foundation of Rome to the Greeks'. And the
conclusion seems inevitable: whether or not they tell the Romulus and
Remus story, in whole or in part, straight or garbled, must be wholly
unconnected with the question of whether it was told at Rome or in Italy
at the time that each author wrote.

And I would also say for good
measure that I don't feel that, when Alcimus or Callias mentions Rhomylos
and Rhomos, that we can be so sure that this does not in some sense relate
to the story as we know it, just because there are other brothers, or
because the story is set in the age of the Trojan War. It is after all
only on the view that these authors are only very tangentially concerned
with Rome, and then very choosy about what they related, that we can deal
with the fact that their silences are as awkward for the history of the
Alban Kings, the other parts of the Romulus legend, and the reigns of Numa
and the other kings of Rome, as they are for the tale of Romulus and
Remus. Or the puzzling variants which make Rhomos the founder of Capua
(Dionysius 1, 17).

The fact is that Greek writers and Italian
cities mixed from the sixth century on, but that that did not in the
slightest generate an enthusiasm for accurate reportage of the barbarian
folkways or a hesitation to attribute to these strange places history or
belief that was entirely invented to suit Hellenic purposes. As we shall
see, that remained possible throughout Antiquity. Hecataeus had had a view
on the foundation of Capua too, and also mentioned Nola. I suppose it is a
more plausible argument from silence than usual to say that it is unlikely
that he even named Rome; but his awareness of what were then Etruscan
cities in the hinterland of the Greek apoikiai of the coast reminds us
that non-Hellenic Italy was in the closest touch with the Hellenic
continuum -- if we needed such a reminder after the Pyrgi tablets and the
new Etruscan dedication on Aegina. Fausto Zevi has recently argued that
the whole saga of the Tarquins as we know it is a unified narrative from
Demaratus to the final exile after the expulsion, and that its purpose is
to chart the family's wealth, with a view to establishing the claim to it
of the city in which their line came to an end -- Cumae, to whose fifth
century local history Zevi attributes the story (F. Zevi, 'Demarato e i re
"Corinzi" di Roma', in A. Storchi Marino, ed. L'incidenza dell'antico.
Studi in memore di Ettore Lepore (Naples 1995).

Whether this
nice idea is true or not, discussions of events and allegiances in sixth
and fifth century Italy will have been no less complex than elsewhere in
the contemporary Mediterranean, and if Hecataeus' informants or the author
of the Cumaean chronicle did not think that Rome had been founded by
Romulus, what did they think its origin had been? My point is that the
genesis of aetiological and legitimating myths out of the exchange of
views between communities had been going on for at least two centuries
before Wiseman's Remus moment. At this period, moreover, as at so many
others, the extent to which Romans themselves wanted a closer or a more
distant relationship with the traditions of Hellenism will have been very
variable (on the urge to consider Rome a Greek city, Coelius Antipater at
Strabo 5, 3, 3). The question is related to the problem of the Silvian
line. When did which Romans or other Italians first come to notice that
there was such a big gap between the age of the nostoi and the epoch of
the foundation of the city? Was it really only after the work of
Eratosthenes? See O. De Cazenove 'La détermination chronographique
de la
durée de la période royale à Rome. Critque des
hypothèses des
modernes' in la Rome des premiers siècles: légende et
histoire
(Florence 1992), 69-98. Coarelli's work has shown how complex the cultural
relationship between Rome and Magna Graecia was in the age when the
Comitium resembled an ekklesiasterion and the Romans made Hellenic
techniques of land- division their own.

How impossible is it that
Epicharmus made a joke about Rome as a Pythagorean city? Plutarch says in
his life of Numa that Pythagoras had been made a Roman citizen, hos
historeken Epicharmos ho komikos en tini logoi pros Antenora gegrammenoi,
palaios aner kai tes Pythagorikes diatribes meteschekos (Numa 8, 9).
Long regarded with contempt, this assertion has looked a little different
since 1966: POxy 2659, a list of Epicharmus' titles, confirms that there
was a play called Antenor. The editors have no difficulty in
interpreting Plutarch's words as an allusion to a speech in the play. At
what date did the idea of Antenor's journey to the west and the migration
of the Enetoi take shape? Pindar has Antenor at Cyrene, but the Adriatic
world was developing apace in the generation that followed. At what date
might a joke like this have first been possible, either in a play of the
real Epicharmus or one spuriously inserted into his corpus? Did the Romans
really dedicate statues of Pythagoras and Alcibiades in the Comitium
bello Samniti? It is striking that Antiochus of Syracuse had told a
story in which a Roman exile featured. How old were the Spartan and
Tarentine traditions in Roman aetiological mythology (recently, M.
Bonnefond-Coudry, 'Mythe de Sparte et politique romaine: les relations
entre Rome et Sparte au début du IIe siècle av. J.-C.',
Ktema 12
(1987), 83-110, with 84 on the alleged Spartan origin of the Sabines)? If
Coarelli is right to link the statues with the years before the Battle of
Sentinum, and to see them as part of the exploration of new cultural
milieux in the dazzlingly successful new Rome of the late fourth century,
then we have come back to the Wiseman Remus moment, but by a different
route, and one which may provide an alternative to the plebeian
explanation and the dramatic context. Twin founders and the idea of an
eventually Spartan past for Rome might appeal to many in that period. The
old view that the twins have an explanatory value for the consulship may
have something in it; that too fits the mood of the late fourth century
well. In the post-Licinio-Sextian age something of Wiseman's plebeian
Remus could be fitted into that picture too.

In other words, the
shifting representations of Rome's foundation story in Greek literature do
not chart Greek scholarly awareness of a changing Roman reality, but the
changing imperatives of power in the Mediterranean and its implications
for the literary world. So the Diocles-moment is that preserved in the
famous Chios inscription (SEG 26, 1123), when the aspirants to friendship
with the new power on the Mediterranean stage announced their intention of
illustrating their new monument with a selection of muthoi pros doxan
Rhomaion. It is at this time that we can see clearly how very delicate
your choice of material had become, compared with the days when Timaeus
could chortle at the Trojan pretentions of the pushy city on the Tiber.
Take Hegesianax of Alexandria Troas. He is a typical figure of the last
age of Rome's Mediterranean conquests: a go-between for Antiochus III to
the Romans, but not (if we follow Gruen, Hellenistic World and the
Coming of Rome 541 n. 51 and 631 n. 91), a King's Man, he started as
an impoverished tragic actor but improved his performance and voice with a
régime which included the complete abstinence from the fig, and
won over
the King by declining to join him in a post-prandial dance -- better to
read
well from his histories than dance badly, he persuasively argued. In this
age histrionic ability and a sense of history, when combined with a
certain opportunism in deploying the past of your native territory,
equipped you for great things. Hegesianax, for all his date, after
Diocles, after Fabius, is one of the authors who does not know, or who
does not choose to propagate, the developed legend of the Twins. Aeneas,
on his view, never got to Italy. It was his children, Ascanius, Rhomos,
Rhomylos and Euryleon (an interestingly Spartan name) who went, and
Rhomylos who founded Rome. By this date, when the Chians were dedicating
the visual evidence of their loyalty to the full detail of the newly
distributed story, this smacks of ideologically motivated revisionism. And
it is striking -- to say the least -- that Hegesianax chose not to
compromise
his position as an international arbitrator by too publicly espousing such
views. His History was published under the pseudonym of Cephalon of
Gergis.

When we hear that the rejection of Aeneas' Italian destiny
was also the view of the Arcadian elegist Agathyllus it is not
unreasonable to reflect on the divergent but strongly-held attitudes to
Rome held in parts of the Peloponnese in the years before 146 (for
Metrodorus of Scepsis and another manifestation of anti-Roman literature,
see now D. Briquel, REL 73 [1995]). My point in piling on this detail is
to suggest, following Wiseman's own encouragement, that these stories may
indeed often have complex contemporary resonances: but to observe that
that is the case for the non-Twin types as much as for the Twin-variants.
In the second century we are able to see the context; but there may have
been just as much reason for the Italian informants of Greek writers of
earlier centuries to pass over elements of the Romans' own nascent
ktisis-myth. It was not only in the aftermath of Rome's unquestioned
authority that things of this moment become available for manipulation by
the likes of Zenodotus of Troezen, who creatively gave Romulus a new son
to flatter the pretentions of a domi nobilis from Lanuvium, as Wiseman
brilliantly showed in his article 'The wife and children of Romulus', his
first foray into this style of enquiry (1983; reprinted in Roman
Papers [1987], 285-92).

In summary, then, I have no difficulty
at all with the pursuit of the ramifications of the Remus element in the
Roman portfolio foundation-stories, or with the idea that this is likely
to be enormously helpful for understanding Rome of the fourth century B.C.
Wiseman has made a huge contribution to this. But I am not so convinced by
his attempt to use the nightmarishly fragmented evidence to prove so
specific and exclusive a case: I am prepared to believe in his Remus but
not always for his reasons.